Getting Inside Don Draper’s Head

We recently had a conversation in the office about the show Mad Men, particularly about Don Draper. We noted that while Don certainly seems to have his professional life together (most of the time), his personal life is a completely different story. He is authoritative and sure of himself at work, but as soon as he steps through the front door of his home, he’s thinking of leaving again. He seems to have it all- the beautiful wife, the well-behaved children, the big house, a liquor cabinet in every room. But man, he just can’t get it together.

Then we talked about how it’s interesting that people can focus so intensely on something and become good at it. Then sometimes their brains sort of give up on thinking so hard, and the easiest tasks become difficult when they’re away from the office. 

For example, remembering tiny details about a project at work. It’s not difficult, and it seems easier to remember these things in the middle of the day, even when we’re working on an unrelated project. Suddenly one of us will pop up and say “oh, we need to do this,” and we’ll keep things on track. But at home, it’s not unusual for one of us to get sidetracked while loading the dishwasher, start another task and come back to the kitchen two hours later to find it still standing open with dishes in the sink. 

We thought maybe it’s the same way with Don. Maybe he focuses so hard on work, that he becomes dysfunctional in his other relationships.

The advertising business is an extremely competitive one; its lifestyle takes getting used to. Is this a recurring characteristic in ad people? Do most of us have some sort of dysfunction when it comes to work and home life? Or is it every industry? Sometimes we really wish we knew exactly what Don was thinking…

Productivity Away From the Office Desk.

Monday thru Friday, for about eight hours each day, you’ll find some of us in the office. But that’s not the case for others of us. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, we’re stationed all over the place, including overseas. It’s not just us. More and more people are embracing the flexibility their jobs offer, and doing their best work at home. There are elements of being at home that are drastically different than being in the office, some of which have taken us a bit to figure out. We thought we’d share a few tips we’ve found helpful along the way.

Office hours.
Establish them. Even at home- especially at home- this is an important thing to do. While perks of working from home include being able to stand up and chat with family members for a few minutes in the middle of the day, or access the coffee machine any time you want, or even pet the dog while doing something that doesn’t require a lot of brain power, there are times when you need to remain uninterrupted. Coming to this agreement with your family (or… good luck… your dog) is necessary for you to remain productive during your time at home.

Tools.
The office is not your home, nor is your home the office. If you’re going back and forth, make sure you have the tools to be productive at both places. For example, do you have a calculator at work, but not at home? Do you have to go searching for a notepad or pencil when you need to sketch something at home, but have an entire area set up for that at work? Work those little details out by making sure you or match your tasks to your location.

Communication.
Maybe it goes without saying, but if you’re working from home, you have the extra burden to be a good communicator. You need to be able to tell the rest of your team what you’re up to, what you’re working on, what you’ve got coming up in your workflow, and on and on. They can’t read your mind, nor do you have a live video stream recording your every move. If you can communicate effectively, this will probably bring you and your team closer together, and be able to pick up each other’s work quickly during busy times. It’s all relative.

Schedules.
We recently had a time change… so did one of our team, Brian, who lives in Brazil. We used to be a mere two hours off, but now we’re four, and that leaves only a few precious hours when we’re all “working” to collaborate on projects. We’ve learned to get as much done as we can without feedback from the other people involved, and this is crucial to making legitimate progress in a timely manner.

Storage.
Having the storage to transition from work to home goes hand in hand with having the tools to do so. If you can, get access to backups by putting them on a hard drive. That way, you don’t have to run into work every time a fire drill occurs and you need information now that can’t wait until you’re in the office tomorrow. Synch what you can. Synch your iPhone, your Outlook, your e-mail, whatever. Having as much information with you wherever you are will help you function better when it comes time to push out work.

More and more jobs are allowing for this type of flexibility, leaving us with more and more options. Working remote has a lot of perks to it- if you can maintain the balance between home-life, the office, and your workflow it just might be ideal. Remaining productive no matter where you are is the key to the game, though, and that might take a little getting used to. These ideas are just a few- but we’re sure there are many more ways to be successful if you’re switching from your desk office to your office office. If you have another tip for being productive while working remote- leave a comment. We’d love to hear your ideas!

Are You Tracking Your Workflow or is it Tracking You?

A design studio or agency does a perpetual exercise in organization. Every day, there are jobs that need to get done. Some are very small jobs. Some are larger. Others are in between. There are also the parts of whole jobs… they all need to get done. They’re all a priority. Is it even possible to manage them? How do you keep track of client issues that need to be followed up with? How do you juggle the project you’re working on with all the other projects you’re overseeing? There’s got to be a way. 

Every studio has to come up with their own method of tracking jobs through its workflow. And the system in place probably varies depending on how many employees there are within the company, whether or not there’s an account manager in place, and the number of clients the studio has at any given point during the year. 

We’ve recently implemented a new system for our workflow: job ID numbers are tagged to each project that comes through our door, and detailed records are kept according to that number. Heck, we even use the job IDs to help us keep billing under control. Although we’re still developing and tweaking our process here and there, we think we’ve landed on a system that could stand the test of time, no matter if the size of our studio changes, or our workflow changes. We’ve tried lots of things in the past, all of which worked for a while, but we felt the need to continually upgrade our system. 

Here’s how we do it.

A client asks us to design and print a new flyer they’d like to distribute. We give this job a number- EM500 (or EM501, or EM733, or whatever number you’d like to start with.). Then we name the job to go along with that number, so it’s easily recognizable at a glance. Say our client’s name is Apple. (Ha! We wish.) We’d name the project EM500 Apple Flyer. Then, as our graphic designers develop mocks, and our traffic coordinators get print quotes from vendors and correspond with the client getting the necessary approvals, we record this information in our project management application. We can refer back to it, upload the finished product, and keep track of every important detail related to this one job. Our process allows us to track lots of parts of jobs via internal tracking numbers. Rather than having client-wide numbers, or project-only numbers. It might seem tedious for everything your studio or agency does, but when you have to dig back through mountains of information in three months because a client has a question on an invoice, you’re going to want to be organized. We’re small, but the transparency this system offers brings us together as a studio and makes us more of a team. 

Follow ups.

Of course there’s always the issue of keeping track of what needs followed up with. When 53 e-mails come sailing into your inbox at one time, you’ve got to skip through and decide what’s the most urgent, then go back and follow up with everything else. Each of us varies on our preference for dealing with this; one of us might flag e-mails that need to be followed up with, while another of us might drag the e-mail into a folder created specifically for follow ups. We do our best to keep tabs on each other and send reminders here and there. What do you do? 

Putting it all together.

What happens when your role within the company is that of designer/programmer/account exec/traffic coordinator/copywriter? You do a bit of everything, and that sometimes makes it hard to keep track of what’s what. We don’t think there’s a set system anyone could put into place that would work without a few tweaks, but there are certain qualities that person should probably develop to a tee. 

* The ability to multi-task. There’s nothing else to say about that.  
* The desire to learn- quickly. With all those titles, you’ve got to become well-rounded to the extremes. 
* The mind to switch gears in an instant. Be dynamic and flexible. 
* The savvy to talk to a client about their project that maybe you haven’t dealt with in three weeks.
* The clarity to separate one project from another when talking to clients.

Although we don’t think design itself is formulaic, tracking work is. It might go without saying, but keeping track of everything in your frontal lobe is bound to fail at some point.

The Happy Studio- Make Your Studio Like a Home.

As creative people, we often find that our creativity translates into lots of aspects of our life beside design. While Gestalt, “variety within unity” and color theory apply to all the great design arts, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re good at everything design related just because you know the basics. It’s true that you could probably have a great conversation with a fashion designer or an architect about how similar graphic design is to their professions- but it doesn’t mean you can sit down and design an award winning skirt, or esplanade.

Still, we for one, would like to believe we at least have the skills to make our space comfortable with a little thinking, and study.

Our studio
A creative space is what you make of it. Some people are inspired by the blankness of white space, others are claustrophobic about it. Some people love loud busy areas with lots of activity, some are irritated and/or terrified by it.

Our studio is wide open. Bigger than we need. If one person is on the phone, everyone hears it. If you want to go for a jog, you have room. Maybe subconsciously we think big ideas need room to move, or maybe we got a good lease rate. Whatever the case, we think that your space should fit your flow. We quite enjoy sitting at our desks listening to ipods, and headphones, but having the space for a video shoot if we need it. It just works for us.

We’ll admit though, it wasn’t always great. It took carving, editing, and a willingness to change. We’ve redesigned our office within the same 4 walls many times until it fit our flow. Like with design, the idea is to allow yourself room to improve in as close to a consequence-free environment as is permitted. Once you give yourself the speed and room to change, your taste can do the rest.

It’s ok to have distractions

We have lots of distractions in our studio.

• a pool table
• a foosball table
• video games and a tv (admittedly in a box)
• the internet
• each other

But the interesting thing is that we’re very under-distracted. It’s in fact, kind of a shock when those of us with smaller bladders gets up, and disrupts things to use the facilities. Phone calls, lunches, conversations, and bathroom breaks. All these things happen feet away from people doing their work, but work still gets done. There is probably a sociology paper ready to be written about our office, but we might summarize it like this: The availability of these distractions makes work more fruitful.

Knowing that we could get up and play pool, or darts, or throw a ball back-and-forth makes work more rewarding because it is our choice to do so. It’s our choice to keep working.

Please, please don’t take this as the crowning example of productivity. In many offices, these distractions might prove irresistible. But with our hiring attitude, our staff, and our workflow… it just works.

Food
We have 2 refrigerators, a Starbucks machine, pop, chips, tea, and water. We’re not Google with sandwich machines, or a cafeteria, but we try. We tend to believe that given a comfy, well stocked environment people will work comfortably longer and more often. We’re not a “butts in seats” type of outfit- but we love to have people around doing their work.

Looking forward to work
When people take ownership, and pride in work, they look forward to showing up. We would love to think that our studio is the type of place people look forward to going to. Because they feel special to work at our business. Of course because of the work we do, and of course because of the people they work with- but also because of our studio environment. It’s not “brass & glass,” but for the people we try to hire, it’s “cool.”

A good chair
We have shoe-stringed a lot in our studio. From the outdoor floodlights we use for cubicle lighting, to the stained concrete, to the pine panels, to the complete lack of anything resembling a ceiling. But there is one thing we are quite happy to have splurged on. Our chairs.

We’re not the only studio to have Aeron’s to sit in. But given our usual budget, it was a lot of money. To be honest though, they were a budget in themselves. In an average year you spend about 2,000 hours sitting in your office chair. The heat, the discomfort, the angle, the torque, they all eject you from work more often than you know. You quite absolutely do not have to get an expensive chair to sit in to do our work, but believe us- it helps more than you know.

All this is to say that we think a work environment should embody who you are as a group. When you feel at home at work, like we do, you do all those things like looking forward to coming in, plopping down in your comfy chair and not being distracted by how uncomfortable you immediately feel, having a mid-morning snack, talking through an idea with your cube-mate, and then developing that idea over a game of pool. Productivity comes in all shapes and sizes. Find your shape. Find your size.

Great Headline, Anyone?

“I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie, there is no system, the universe is indifferent.” -Don Draper, Mad Men.

Writing for the web is, as most people know by now, completely different than writing for other mediums. There are things like the structure and length of the paragraph, the use of bullet points, and the sheer amount of content that isn’t quite the same online as a piece you might see in a newspaper. One aspect of writing holds the same level of importance across the board, though, and that is a headline. While a visitor might be indifferent when they reach a site, once they get there it’s up to us to impress. We dazzle with design, and they stay a minute longer to poke around a bit. Then they start actually reading the content, and that’s where we want to hook them.

Headline writing is something we feel we’re not too shabby at, and something that we embrace to set us aside from our competition. Witty, sleek, edgy and sometimes funny headers can be seen on the sites we generate content for, giving the site a personality all its own. In any event, headlines are what allows a visitor to scan the web page for the information they’re looking for- they’re what either draws that visitor in or pushes them away.

The Pundits.

There are a lot of people out there who swear they have fool-proof formulas for writing stellar headlines. We’re not going to pretend to know all the answers, but here’s our take on the issue: Short and sweet. Identify a problem, then tell the reader how you’re going to solve it. Be original. Put those three things together and chances are you’ll end up with a great headline that serves its purpose and grabs attention at the same time.

While working on a project recently, we came up with a way to cross reference a few methods to come up with even more original lines. We’re giving away our secrets, but that’s okay, because a great headline is great to read no matter who wrote it. We looked up well known phrases, picked a key word in the phrase and plugged it into this rhyming site to see if we could create a new phrase that strikes the same chord as the original, but with our custom theme seeping through. Still keeping it short and simple, and solving a problem.

Another method is to take a well known phrase and break it down into shorter, more succinct thoughts. For example:

Phrase: Get your foot in the door.
Headline: Your foot. Their door.

This references a way to set a meeting that is usually very difficult to get. It’s specific, implies a very real problem, and lets the reader know that information in the following paragraph(s) will tell them how to get their foot in the door.

What else is out there?

Even though “how-to” and “list” headlines are all the rage these days, www.copyblogger.com has some other ideas to mix it up a bit. Some of their better bits include “Have a (blank) You Can Be Proud Of,” and “Who Else Wants (blank)?”. Although these headlines might be seen more often in a sales-copy setting, and as basic as they are, they still seem to grab attention.

Read the entire article here: http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/

Appeal to the reader. What’s in it for them? People generally don’t read online content for the hell of it. They (understandably) want something out of it. They want answers, inspiration, something.

A Top 10 List from www.notrain-nogain.org:
• Write in the present tense. Use active verbs.
• Put the key words of the story in the main head.
• Get the most important story element in the headline. Headlines should tell readers what happened and why the news is important to readers.
• Avoid puns.
• Be accurate.
• Be interesting and inviting. Headlines should be an advertisement for the story, but they should never be so cute that they fail to instantly tell the news.
• Be creative. Headlines can and should creatively convey a mood or emotion when appropriate, but they must always tell the news in clear and direct fashion.
• Don’t pirate the lead of the story or give away the ending. Stealing the lead means repeating it almost verbatim. You do want to make sure the headline matches the tone of the story.
• Rarely (almost never) use short, verb-less labels as main heads for news stories. They fail to tell the news.
• Avoid headlinese. Make headlines conversational.

There’s a great article on www.instigatorblog.com about how few people write headlines for google or digg, but even fewer write headlines for people. The piece talks about how a headline channels the insane amount of content out there to your target audience. Worth a quick read!

Read it here: http://www.instigatorblog.com/the-best-headlines-are-not-just-written-for-search-engines-or-digg/2007/03/28/

A lot of people say that once you’ve got a great headline, the body copy will fall into place. We think it’s important to spend a lot of time on those few words that introduce your body copy. Hopefully with the right resources and tools in your hands, you’ll generate something that will break the streak of indifference Don Draper is so sure exists out there…